We had our first planning meeting today for one of the high points of my year, the annual Shelbyville appearance by The Nashville Symphony.

I was tut-tutting about Dennis Swanberg’s ugly web site yesterday. Well, the site linked to above is just as bad — and in this case, it’s all mine. I’m trying to get better at laying out a web page without tables, and with the program I’m using that’s like trying to feel my way around a room in the dark. The WYSIWYG display isn’t anywhere close to what shows up when I actually preview the layout in a browser. It looks awful, but I hope to clean it up some before we get close enough to the concert for anyone to actually look at it.

At today’s meeting, the Nashville Symphony staffers handed out copies of the mailer urging their existing ticket-holders to buy their seats in the new Schermerhorn Symphony Center, which will open this fall. There’s a CD-ROM in the book which takes you on a computer-animated tour of the new hall, and it’s spectacular. The acoustics are supposed to be among the best concert halls in the world.

Meanwhile, here in Shelbyville, we have a lot of fun hosting the symphony in a horse arena on the grounds of the Tennessee Walking Horse National Celebration. It’s a family-friendly concert, featuring performances by five-year-old dance tap dance students and the local community college jazz band, among others, as well as the symphony itself.